Blogpost 101

(It really is the 101st of this particular blog, for what that's worth. It feels like I've been writing the same fucking post, over and over and over.)

Let's kill off another fantasy, why don't we.

I sent a long email to the owner of crunchy granola restaurant today, basically saying that, much as I want to work there, I can't afford to do it unless and until I get more of some other kind of (more lucrative) work. Because, really, that's the situation. Hateful as I find the bakery, I'm stuck there.

Here's the other thing that's been going on in my head for awhile now. Whenever I'm around college-age people--or even in a crowd of relatively recent graduates, like I was Saturday night--I can't help but feel as though I've completely wasted my life. I have talents, I have skills, I have abilities, I might even have a little wisdom, at this point, but I've made a series of bad choices and bad decisions (and, to be fair, I've had some bad luck along the way, but who doesn't) such that I feel like I'm living in a cramped corner. You can't point to any one of those choices or decisions and say, "There! THAT was the bad one!" Rather, it's a series of small steps, tiny increments of failure that eat away at space and time, leaving me in that corner. I can see the person I was 30 years ago, the enthusiasm, the naive, blundering well-meaningness, and I can see her promise, and then I look at what I've done with my life, and I wonder how I could have done such a poor job of it.

This is not a plea for reassurance or something. I know that I DO, in fact, have talents, skills, etc. But I'm using almost none of them, and I do not see how I am going to find a place, or create a place, or get to a place, where I use even some of them in ways that are valuable for anything other than my own bare survival.

In truth, arguably the worst thing I did was to get involved with Chuck--that's where my money went, for example. Without him, I'd have enough money in the bank to work only one job, or to start my own business after all, or to do any number of things. And I've realized that what did me in was and is the fact that no one has ever lied to me anywhere near that often. He was lying to me, about at least one thing, every single day that I was with him, and he married me, in front of our friends and family, while lying about several things that he knew were important to me. I don't think anyone quite expects that much lying--certainly noone else in my life has ever come within a long plane ride of him in that regard--and, because he's a very good liar, there weren't a lot of big red flags, just the occasional flutter in the breeze that he could explain away. That is, it's difficult to regard it as a "bad decision," because I think of such things as situations where one sees the facts and makes a dumb move anyway. I simply did not have, and could not have had, the necessary facts.

But I'm sure you could go through the alumni magazine and find plenty of other people who had similar experiences. One old friend/lover, for example, whose first wife had the same diagnosis as Chuck: at one point, while he was away at a conference, she put his belongings on the street and changed the locks. (She also ran up massive debt on the company AmEx card, which caused her to be canned.) He has since remarried, has a couple of kids, has an academic appointment, and is doing good work in his field.

We could argue that my experience with Chuck was also timed incredibly poorly, in that it combined several factors that are difficult to overcome under any circumstances and particularly difficult to overcome when one is as old as I am. That is, while he's certainly an asshole, and he certainly is responsible for some portion of the shitty situation I'm in, it's not all due to him.

And see how I'm using my training in philosophy? To parse the situation into little teeny bits, trying to apportion responsibility among the people and factors that seem relevant. All of which is an attempt to make sense of it, to tell a story that I can believe, at least for a little while, because the alternative is a kind of despair that I don't know how to assuage.

I keep clinging to my morning DJ's words today--he did a little essay on rock and roll t-shirts (I can direct you to the podcast, if you really want to hear it), and he talked about the zillions he has, and he mentioned one from some thrash metal band that said, on the back, "Die in Pain." Which he thought was just funny, because death isn't enough? it doesn't make you Interesting enough? You have to add the pain part?

And I try to laugh at myself, too, because of the above-mentioned alternative.